A Possible Interface
When this project began, there was a fairly clear vision of what the interface to the car computer could look like. Seeing as the presentation is coming up this week, I felt it was high time to put the idea into a format where it can be shared with others. This touch-screen would stow-away in the slot designed for optional cd-changer units, and would slide out like a drawer, then hinge down so that it could be easily usable from the front seats.

While I had initially intended to build this unit into a car, I am having difficulty locating a reasonably-priced touch-screen that has a diagonal of 6 inches or less. The units I found generally tend to be for medical equipment or factory equipment purposes, and as such, are far more expensive than common sense would indicate. Understandable, seeing as the general consumer would not find such equipment very useful.

The difficulty in obtaining a screen coupled with the Xbox's green-tint VGA output are making the unit look less and less appealing for car-pc purposes. The initial benefits of low cost (~$200), good durability (designed to be handled by children), and fairly low power requirements (~100W) seem to be offset by minor annoyances that make it impractical to build a fully-functional in-dash unit. The very cold weather of this January has not been helpful either. Would it even be safe to spin up a hard drive at -30°C temperatures?Would the electronics be able to handle the condensation that would follow shortly thereafter?

For the project, it should be possible to work without actually building the computer in. For the poster-fair/demo I have come up with a simple method of exporting the display to a touch-screen laptop that should show how things are to work. This model may even be considered as an alternative to VGA output, using a PDA mounted on the dash to interact with the car computer. Still, I was hoping to have a fully-functional car computer in the end.